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next-level frantic activity Wednesday, June 5 2024
The roofing crew was back again this morning bright and early, though at this stage they were mostly just installing shingles, which has a characteristic noise of pauses punctuated by a pattern of rapid pneumatic-gun firings. There were still plenty of shingles left to be installed, and there were also small parts of the roof (over our tiny "lawyer foyer" entrance, the flatter section of roof over the shop, and a series of narrow seemingly-decorative rooflets in the back of the house) where the old shingles had yet to be removed. By this point I had such confidence in their workmanship that I didn't feel the need to go out to make sure they weren't fucking up.
The morning was still getting going and I was sitting at my desk in the laboratory when Gretchen sharply called to me. She said someone was being an asshole about our cars parked in the Farm Road, the sort of thing I'd feared would happen when she'd blithely proposed that we park them there. (But that was an argument I hadn't felt like having, so I'd gone along.) Still, it didn't seem like too much trouble to move them, so I grabbed the keys to the Forester while Gretchen got the ones for the Bolt, and we walked out to our cars at the north end of the Farm Road. There was a skinny guy with a grey pony tail in a dark grey pickup waiting for us to move our cars. I hadn't seen him before, but I assumed from the context that he was one of the owners (or a family member of an owner) of one of the several parcels that can only be reached by the Farm Road. We hike on those parcels, so it didn't seem like a good idea to be antagonizing such people. But Gretchen was in a rage and she waved a little sign that I'd left on one of our windshields at the ponytailed man. It had included an apology for blocking the road and a phone number, as well as the reason: that we were having our roof replaced. The ponytailed man seemed defensive at this, saying almost apologetically that he hadn't had his phone on him. Then Gretchen shouted a series of sarcastic curses at him as she climbed into the Bolt. She then swerved the car at his truck menacingly, as if she was so mad that she thought it was worth thousands of dollars in vehicle repairs to better express her rage. I was horrified at this behavior, and after we'd parked our cars on the side of Dug Hill Road, I told her, "look, there's nothing to be gained by antagonizing that guy." "He was an asshole!" she snarled. Evidently he'd been a lot more unpleasant in his initial contact than in what I'd seen of his behavior. Still, if he was an owner of property we hike through, it made no sense to be anything but apologetic in this situation. [Only later would I learn that he was actually just the guy Georges hires to maintain his pool, though it's a pool Gretchen frequently swims in.]
Later this morning, our cleaning lady showed up for her monthly deep-clean of the first and second floors of our house. She's on a schedule and just shows up automatically on the days she's scheduled. But it always comes as a surprise. That she would be cleaning while the roofers were roofing and while Jack the Dog was still under our care gave the day exactly the kind of next-level frantic activity that I've designed my life to largely avoid. Not only would I be holed up in the house because of the roofing, but I'd be holed up in the laboratory because of the cleaning. Making matters even worse, one of the roofers for some reason decided to take his lunch break on the laboratory deck. He sat in a plastic chair facing me as I sat at my computer, and he did this for nearly an hour. This meant that I had essentially zero privacy in the one place I can usually count on for finding some. He wasn't actually staring at me, of course; he was staring at his phone. But his face was in my direction, and it felt a little like I was working in an office. You know how it is in an office: you just want to do some e-commerce or watch a YouTube video, but you wonder what your colleagues will think if they see you doing it. The thing I was wanting to do while the roofer was out there in that chair outside my window was to pour some gin into a glass of orange juice I'd managed to get from the kitchen, having waited first for the mopping done by our cleaner to dry. But I didn't want that roofer to see me grab a bottle of gin in the middle of an afternoon. I'd never see him again after today, but I didn't want him spreading a legend in the Albany Hispanic community about a wacky house near Kingston occupied by a gringo baracho. So I kept not adding gin to my orange juice, hoping at some point the roofer's lunch break would end. Eventually it did, and I could finally dull my frazzled nerves. (I'd painted a picture of a Neanderthal skull in order, under my personal booze rules, to buy me the "right" to drink.)
It was a hot muggy day, and since I had to have the laboratory window closed to wall off some personal space for myself, I was running the air conditioner (something I'd also done yesterday). The weather and the distraction of the roofers made it impossible for me to take the dogs on their usual afternoon walk. (I'd had better success yesterday, though only Charlotte and Jack had gone, and I'd cut the walk short when I'd started worrying that Gretchen might've forgotten about her prison poetry class again.)
This evening I pan-seared some tempeh and red onions (there were no mushrooms) and boiled up a pot of spaghetti that I cooked with broccoli. So there was something for Gretchen to eat when she got home.
At around 7:00pm, the roofers were finishing up the last of their cleanup. We commended them on their work, and they headed off, leaving a tow-trailer they'd completely filled with roof debris. Gretchen considered that trailer a great opportunity for us to get rid of other trash, so she compelled me to go through things in the garage to decide whether I really needed them. As you know, I'm someone who makes lots of things from other things, often improvising solutions that require the kinds of materials that most people would throw away. So I don't like going through my stuff if the idea is to find things to throw away. But I humored Gretchen, forcing myself to require a high threshold of utility in order to keep things. I was particularly indulgent of her desire to throw things away when it came to a box of old music CDs. I never use CDs at all, and they have no sentimental value to me, because all I care about is the actual music. And I have all of that in very-easy-to-use (and find) music files. It was actually Gretchen who was seeing value in those, suggesting that we sell my many indie-rock classics to Rhino Records (a store in Kingston that evidently still buys and sells music media). As we kept throwing things in the trailer, I asked what we'd do when the person coming to haul off the trailer finds it full of household trash and old CDs. She insisted nobody was going to care. But if I'd argued with her about the wisdom of parking our cars on the Farm Road, she would've said the same thing.

I painted a tiny painting of a Neanderthal skull today. Occasionally I like to tiny one side of objects red and the other side blue. Click to enlarge.
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